A Bargain of Bargains
A blue haze hung on the distant hills when Padna Dan looked pensively from the landscape to his watch, and said to his friend Micus Pat, who stood by his side: “The world is surely a wonderful and a beautiful place as well; but it would seem as though there were wings on the feet of time, so quickly does night follow day.”
“Time is the barque that carries us from the cradle to the grave, and leaves us on the shores of the other world alone,” said Padna. “And as my poor mother used to say:
Time, like youth, will have its fling,
And of a beggar make a king;
And of a king a beggar make,
Merely for a joke’s sake.
Time indeed brings many changes. Cromwell made peasants of the Irish gentry, and America made gentry of the Irish peasantry, and awful snobs some of them became too! But a whit for snobbery, for what is it but an adjunct of prosperity, like gout, which disappears again with adversity.”
“Snobbery at best is a foolish thing,” said Micus.